Light it again, Sam.

A report claims to have smoked out secret contracts between Big Tobacco and old-time Hollywood, where movie stars received big bucks to endorse cigarettes.

Researchers at the Tobacco Control journal reveal that many of the biggest names of Hollwyood’s golden age – including Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall – took money to endorse tobacco products.

Movie studios also reportedly received compensation to use images of cigarette smoking in films like “Captains Courageous,” “Topper,” The Prisoner of Zenda,” “Kid Galahad,” and “Lost Horizon.”

“Commercial arrangements between the movie industry and tobacco companies were there from the very beginning,” wrote Stanton Glantz, a University of California in San Francisco professor who co-authored the study.

Other big name stars whose bank accounts were puffed up by tobacco companies included Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Al Jolson, Spencer Tracy, Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, Edward G. Robinson, Carole Lombard, and Fred MacMurray.

This evil cabal conned unsuspecting 1930s America into wanton cigar chomping and belligerent butt smoking. The hucksters plied Ma and Pa Middle America with their Borscht Belt humor and forced them to inhale noxious tobacco smoke piped into the Cineplex. After an afternoon of watching Tom Mix and Buck Rogers little children were found to have an irresistible desire to light up a square, race Jallopies down Elm Street and Scream Stella at the tops of their pre-cancerous lungs. Those bastards!

All tolled, tobacco companies spent the equivalent of $3.2 million in 2008 dollars on the celebrity endorsements.